Abstract

While much has been written in tourism literature about what is tourism as sustainable development, particularly in the context of planning, management and best practice, there has been little focus on methodologies designed to assess that sustainability. It is suggested that too often we are presented with a snapshot of a given situation at a particular point in time which does not reveal the processes at work over time; and a judgement about sustainability in the absence of the historical perspective and/or a longitudinal study must therefore be treated with caution. This paper examines the value of historical methodology for determining the sustainability of tourism development. It then applies this approach to an examination of a festival which has survived in China for about 800 years. The dynamics and interrelationships between political, sociocultural and economic forces, essential to an understanding of tourism in a holistic way, may thus be related to the sustainability of a tourism development.